AWS Global Infrastructure: Availability Zones, Regions and Edge Locations

Welcome to the another blog!

Guys, Previously we see what is AWS, MFA & Password Policy, Budget e.t.c.

Amazon Web Services is a global public cloud provider, and have a global network of infrastructure to run and manage its services.

In this post, we’ll take a look at the components that make up the AWS Global Infrastructure.

• Availability Zones (AZs)
• Regions
• Edge Locations

If you are using AWS, you should have clear understanding on these three components.

Regions:- Region is like a collection of Availability Zones. Regions are geographic locations across the world, we can choose any region to deploy our work loads on AWS. AWS has deployed them across the globe to allow its worldwide customer base to take advantage of low latency and high availability connection. Currently there are 31 AWS region globally. It’s increasing day by day.

Every region consists of 2 or more cluster of datacenters called “availability zone”.

Every region has a name and it’s code.

Please find below for example:-

Advantages of AWS Regions

• You can choose any region to deploy your work loads on AWS
• Every region has a name and it’s code
• Give you flexibility to deploy your workloads
• Lower latency access to applications
• Disaster recovery site

Cost benefits- Every region has different pricing. If we compare north Virginia and Singapore, here north Virginia is cheaper than Singapore.

Availability Zones(AZs)- An availability zone is one or more individually separate and distinct data centers with redundant power, networking and connectivity in an AWS Region. It’s a group of Data Centers, a single availability zone is equal to a single data center. AZs are where the actual compute, storage, network, and database resources are hosted. Each AZ has been isolated from the others using separate power and network connectivity that minimizes impact.

This localized geographical grouping of multiple AZs, which would include multiple data centers, is defined as an AWS Region, please have a look.

All AZs are located somewhere between 50 to 100 km. Availability Zones ensures remains stable, available, and resilient when faced with a disaster.

Every availability zone has a corresponding code which consists of region code followed by alphabets.

Let’s take an example of Mumbai zone
Mumbai region has 3 availability zones.

Mumbai region code = ap-south-1
Availability zone 1 = ap-south-1a
Availability zone 2 = ap-south-1b
Availability zone 3 = ap-south-1c

While creating a resource, AWS provides us an option to pick the Region and the AZs.

The following factors are used for picking an AWS Region.

• Pricing (North Virginia Region is the oldest and the cheapest Region)
• Security and compliance requirement
• User/customer location
• Service availability
• Latency

Edge Locations- In AWS Global Infrastructure, the Edge Locations used for caching the static and streaming data. Currently, there is a global network of 187 Points of Presence (176 Edge Locations and 11 Regional Edge Caches) in 69 cities across 30 countries. When compared to the AZs, the number of edge locations is almost triple and close to the end-user. This makes the Edge Locations a ripe candidate for caching data, while the regions are for hosting web servers, databases and so on.

These Edge Locations provide lower latency when compared to the Regions. When a request is made by the user, the Edge Location checks if the data is there locally and if not then gets the data from the appropriate Region, stores it locally and then passes it on to the user.

Why we need Regions and Availability Zones?

Let’s suppose you are using your on premise Data Center but, what if any disaster hit your data center ? I this case you have one and only option, you have to complete shutdown your application.

There is no Data center in Nepal but how services can be delivered to their county? Simply they can choose Mumbai region and Data center for getting highly availability.

So to avoid such scenario and to provide proper availability and scalability we need AWS Regions and Availability Zones.

“P.S. If you read it till the end, Thank you!…

This article is part of AWS Career Growth Program (AWS-CGP) by Pravin Mishra

For more AWS related content please visit the website.”